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Private Cloud vs Public Cloud Security Challenges

As a system administrator during the early days of the “cloud revolution” I found the “cloud” metaphor an interesting choice to frame the technology stack. Clouds, in my mind, were “woolly” and hard to pin down as opposed to the omnipresent, always-available things that IT marketers were suggesting cloud services would be. But whilst I wasn’t a fan...
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Top Tax Scams to Watch out For

Diligent taxpayers are being increasingly targeted by con artists who are well-versed in manipulating the revenue system. The crooks usually impersonate IRS (U.S. Internal Revenue Service) officials, sending fake emails or messages on social media in an attempt to defraud the targeted individuals of their money. Unfortunately, lots of people fall...
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Hacking Is Not a Crime! Additional Thoughts from DEFCON 2019

In my previous post, I spoke about all of the different DEFCON villages where attendees can learn about and purchase all sorts of fun hacking/counter hacking tools. Even so, I covered only a small fraction of the activities at the conference. For example, attendees have the opportunity to participate in a lot of contests run over the weekend,...
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Critical Security Vulnerability Disclosed in iTerm2 App

A critical vulnerability has been discovered in the popular iTerm2 application, an open source terminal emulator program designed to replace the default Apple Terminal in macOS. iTerm2 often finds its way into lists of some of the best software to install on a Mac. It is especially popular with power...
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The Current State of CCPA - What You Need to Know

In the digital age, more often than not, you can be sure that some enterprise has hold of your personal information. This information could be your name, email, phone number, IP address, country and other details. This can come from submitting a form, subscribing to a newsletter, accepting cookies, accepting the privacy policy or terms and...
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VERT Threat Alert: October 2019 Patch Tuesday Analysis

Today’s VERT Alert addresses Microsoft’s October 2019 Security Updates. VERT is actively working on coverage for these vulnerabilities and expects to ship ASPL-853 on Wednesday, October 9th. In-The-Wild & Disclosed CVEs There are no in-the-wild or disclosed CVEs this month. CVE Breakdown by Tag While historical Microsoft Security Bulletin...
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Instagram Launches New Feature to Help Users Identify Phishing Emails

Instagram announced the release of a new feature that's designed to help its users identify phishing emails impersonating the social media platform. On October 7, Instagram tweeted out about the new capability and said that users can leverage it to verify whether an email claiming to originate from the social network is legitimate. https://twitter...
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Decryption Keys Released by Developer of HildaCrypt Ransomware

The developer of HildaCrypt has released the master decryption keys that would allow potential victims of the ransomware to recover their data for free. On October 4, a security researcher who goes by the name "GrujaRS" posted about the discovery of a new variant of STOP, a well-known ransomware family. https://twitter.com/GrujaRS/status...
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NCSAM: It’s Everyone’s Job to Ensure Online Safety at Work

October is National Cyber Security Awareness Month (NCSAM). NCSAM is a great initiative to help educate and inform our friends and family on the importance of taking your digital security seriously. To help continue to support this initiative, we asked a range of industry experts to share some of their tips to help us stay safe online. Angus...
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Secure Configuration in Cloud - IaaS, PaaS and SaaS Explained

If I asked you what security products you had in place to manage your risk within your IT organisation 10 years ago, you’d probably have been able to list a half dozen different tools and confidently note that most of your infrastructure was covered by a common set of key products such as antivirus, DLP, firewalls, etc. But in a world with IaaS,...
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Automating Secure Configuration Management in the Cloud

For many organizations moving to the cloud, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) like AWS EC2, Azure Virtual Machines or Google Compute Engine often forms the backbone of their cloud architecture. These services allow you to create instances of pretty much any operating system almost instantly. Unfortunately, moving your IT infrastructure to the cloud...
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Tripwire Patch Priority Index for September 2019

Tripwire's September 2019 Patch Priority Index (PPI) brings together important vulnerabilities from Microsoft and Adobe. Exploit Framework Alert A Metasploit Exploit module that targets Windows Remote Desktop Services has been recently released. This exploit module targets CVE-2019-0708 for the so-called “BlueKeep” vulnerability. This...
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Discovery of Geost Botnet Made Possible by Attacker OpSec Fails

A series of operational security (OpSec) failures on the part of attackers enabled researchers to discover the Geost botnet. In mid-2018, Virus Bulletin researchers Sebastian Garcia, María José Erquiaga and Anna Shirokova discovered Geost, one of the largest Android banking botnets known today, while...
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Attackers Targeting U.S. Petroleum Companies with Adwind RAT

Digital criminals have launched a new attack campaign that they're using to target U.S. petroleum companies with the Adwind RAT. Netskope discovered the operation in the beginning of September and found that it was distributing the Adwind RAT from “members[.]westnet[.]com[.]au/~joeven/.” With this URL in mind, it's likely that the individual...